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Our enquiry obliges us to use terms not strictly applicable:
we insist, once more, that not even for the purpose of forming
the concept of the Supreme may we make it a duality; if now we
do, it is merely for the sake of conveying conviction, at the
cost of verbal accuracy.
If, then, we are to allow Activities in the Supreme and make them
depend upon will- and certainly Act cannot There be will-less and
these Activities are to be the very essence, then will and
essence in the Supreme must be identical. This admitted, as He
willed to be so He is; it is no more true to say that He wills
and acts as His nature determines than that His essence is as He
wills and acts. Thus He is wholly master of Himself and holds His
very being at His will.
Consider also that every being in its pursuit of its good seeks
to be that good rather than what it is it judges itself most
truly to be when it partakes of its good: in so far as it thus
draws on its good its being is its choice: much more, then, must
the very Principle, The Good, be desirable in itself when any
fragment of it is very desirable to the extern and becomes the
chosen essence promoting that extern's will and identical with
the will that gave the existence?
As long as a thing is apart from its good it seeks outside
itself; when it holds its good it itself as it is: and this is no
matter of chance; the essence now is not outside of the will; by
the good it is determined, by the good it is in self-possession.
If then this Principle is the means of determination to
everything else, we see at once that self-possession must belong
primally to it, so that, through it, others in their turn may be
self-belonging: what we must call its essence comports its will
to possess such a manner of being; we can form no idea of it
without including in it the will towards itself as it is. It must
be a consistent self willing its being and being what it wills;
its will and itself must be one thing, all the more one from the
absence of distinction between a given nature and one which would
be preferred. What could The Good have wished to be other than
what it is? Suppose it had the choice of being what it preferred,
power to alter the nature, it could not prefer to be something
else; it could have no fault to find with anything in its nature,
as if that nature were imposed by force; The Good is what from
always it wished and wishes to be. For the really existent Good
is a willing towards itself, towards a good not gained by any
wiles or even attracted to it by force of its nature; The Good is
what it chose to be and, in fact, there was never anything
outside it to which it could be drawn.
It may be added that nothing else contains in its essence the
principle of its own satisfaction; there will be inner discord:
but this hypostasis of the Good must necessarily have
self-option, the will towards the self; if it had not, it could
not bring satisfaction to the beings whose contentment demands
participation in it or imagination of it.
Once more, we must be patient with language; we are forced to
apply to the Supreme terms which strictly are ruled out;
everywhere we must read "So to speak." The Good, then, exists; it
holds its existence through choice and will, conditions of its
very being: yet it cannot be a manifold; therefore the will and
the essential being must be taken as one identity; the act of the
will must be self-determined and the being self-caused; thus
reason shows the Supreme to be its own Author. For if the act of
will springs from God Himself and is as it were His operation and
the same will is identical with His essence, He must be
self-established. He is not, therefore, "what He has happened to
be" but what He has willed to be.
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